September 14, 2017

“Julien Lescoeur works with such a unique precision. He keeps on visting the spaces that he is planning to photograph over and over again. In his photographs I always sense the beauty of isolation — in this emptiness, fundamental questions such as the question of life or the question of signification are contained. Juliens photographs are mournful and suggestively violent, and every series seems to reflect his inner balance – like an opened diary.” (Lucia Lux)

“My descriptive approach combines a pictorial character and a neutral distance, an inspiring silence. Cultivating the aesthetics of presence through the idea of absence, I subtly question the relationship of man to his urban environment.” (Julien Lescoeur)

Please don’t hesitate to contact us to arrange a private view of the exhibition.

Max Dax: What does the term “Aerolithiques” actually mean?

Julien Lescoeur: It’s French and it literally means “out of space”. It describes something that you cannot identify, something that is from out of space. It took me a long time to actually find the title. It came to me three years after I had made the photos. My photos are not telling you what to think or how to interpret them. A title therefore must deal with that. The title shouldn’t be a “key” to interpretation. But of course it has more to do with the idea of space than with a scientific approach to space. The photos are encounters with objects that you can’t identify.

MD: The ‘Aerolithique’ seems to be nothing more than a grey, cubic box.

JL: Yes, but the cube is a symbol. It is charged with a broad scale of references — paintings, films, legends and the idea of isolation. The monolith in Stanley Kubrick’s “A Space Odyssee” stands for God, the creator of the world. In that sense, a simple cube can be loaded with significance and can therefore be a very strong object. I try to analyze the absolutism of the cube in my photographs. And I analyze it by using the simplest elements that photography allows: horizontals, verticals, volume. The resulting images are then subject to interpretation.

MD: What cube did you actually photograph?

JL: I had a studio during my residency at ZKU in Berlin-Moabit. On the ceiling some pipes were covered by a white, wooden box. Actually, the whole room was painted white and so was the box. I had this object just over my head all my day. I started to stare at it and I finally decided to make some photos of it.

MD: Was it an otherwise empty studio?

JL: No, it wasn’t empty. On the floor I had a sofa and some furniture. But the ceiling was empty — except for this box that was supposed to hide the pipes.

MD: You were looking at the ceiling and you saw a different space?

JL: Exactly. Every morning I’d have my coffee in my studio and gaze at the ceiling. And after some weeks I noticed the cubic wooden construction up there was clearly not a part of the original architecture. It had been added eventually. That struck my attention. In every of my previous series I reinterpreted something that I had seen in the urban environment. And this time I started to examine and to reinterpret a three-dimensional structure in my own studio.

MD: Do you try to abstract?

JL: That’s what I mean when I use the term “to isolate”. I isolate or abstract an object from its surroundings — be it a gas station at night in the moment where absolutely nothing is happening or be it a box underneath my studio ceiling. Getting a perfect frontal view of that box then becomes my subject for the next weeks or months. In this case I had to get a huge ladder to get really close to the box. Then I started experimenting with a tripod that I would glue to the ceiling. Some of the photographs from the “Aerolithiques” series were taken from a camera angle really close to the ceiling, only 20 or 30 centimeters away from the box — there simply wasn’t more space I could use. I basically did the photos upside down. And that’s exactly why you lose the perspective when you gaze at them. They are not only headfirst, but also inverted. It’s basically what you’d see when you’d look at the negatives. This way, the images become more open to interpretation. They become symbolic. You lose the aspect of architecture.

MD: The images from the “Aerolithiques” series have an eerie quality; they are very dark and haunting.

JL: This double inversion upside/down and negative/positive creates an atmosphere of fiction.

MD: Are there ghosts present in your photographs?

JL: Yes, there are. Before I made the “Aerolithiques” I had been having a break for a year. I hadn’t made any photos because a very dear and close person in my life had passed away. So, when I photographed the box on the ceiling there definitely was the ghost of that person present. I would go so far as to say that death is present in these photos. In that sense, the “Aerolithiques” are the most personal photos I’ve ever made in my life.

Read the full interview transcript of situation 33 with Julien Lescoeur as conducted by Max Dax on Nadine Endtner’s great blog VISUAL THOUGHTS on photogryphy.

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August 30, 2017

III.
In the woods there is a bird;
his song stops you and makes you blush.
There is a clock that never strikes.
There is a hollow with a nest of white beasts.

There is a cathedral that goes down and a lake that goes up.
There is a little carriage abandoned in the copse
or that goes running down the road beribboned.
There is a troupe of little actors in costume, glimpsed on the road
through the border of the woods.
And then, when you are hungry and thirsty,
there is someone who drives you away.
(A. Rimbaud)

Mai 5, 2017

STRRR is the future of horizon-expanding television, where superstars and brilliant newcomers hailing from the world of music, art, design, film, and fashion present their favorite clips, films, and videos through the nearly unlimited archives of YouTube and Vimeo. Each meticulously crafted episode presents a self-portrait of the selector which allows the public never before seen insight into their life and work. In STRRR’s first season, among others, DJ Hell, H.P. Baxxter, pianist Alice Sara Ott, the award-winning director Ana Lily Amirpour, art curator Markus Müller (Venice Biennale 2015), “Kompakt” co-founder Wolfgang Voigt and UK Grime shooting star Shogun give in-depth interviews in which they speak about important clips that played a key role in terms of influencing their lives and careers.
The editorial team is led by Max Dax (former editor-in-chief of Spex and Electronic Beats). STRRR’s long-term goal: to create a deep bond between creator and audience. Max explains: “STRRR depicts important social, human topics as well as pop-cultural sensations. The viewer is experiencing the superstars‘ key media encounters from their vantage point.”
STRRR is the answer to media usage that has increasingly become controlled by algorithms. Everyone is familiar with suggestive phrases like “This might be of interest to you” or “You might also enjoy this video” and the accompanying numbing feeling that comes with being caught in a YouTube black hole. Carefully chosen selectors replace the role of artificial intelligence with STRRR. They curate the Internet from an unprecedented perspective, presenting thematic topics and giving the viewer a new approach to the world’s largest video archives. Many of us remember the golden age when music television was still music television. A time in which people sat spellbound in front of the TV, continuously experiencing the new, the undiscovered, and the unheard of through the filter of the era’s greatest tastemakers.
„At STRRR, we value people more than algorithms,“ Daniel Brandt, founder of STRRR, explains. „STRRR broadcasts Internet TV formats that no search engine or recommendation algorithm could ever replicate. STRRR stands for a human, and therefore always surprising take on the culture that connects us in the digital age. This approach is embedded into each selector’s DNA.”
In terms of subjects covered, STRRR has no boundaries as the number of host-selectors is constantly expanding. Both the underground scene and larger, society-based themes are meant to play an equally important role. Neither the newest nor the most sensationalized clips are the focus, but rather a decelerated yet entertaining form of storytelling.
STRRR (www.strrr.tv) launches in May 2017 and is free. STRRR can be experienced via a laptop, tablet, or smartphone. Apps for Smart TV, Apple TV, and Amazon Fire TV will be available in the future.

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April 18, 2017

Sophia Tabatadze’s exhibition (April 27 – May 3) “Forced Play” features drawings and sculptures made from paper and wood. These structures are called islands; they stand as floating pieces, being individuals as well as intersecting with each other. Components of these islands are national symbols, flags, pie-chart like shapes and welcome signs that are not very welcoming. Also included in the exhibition are text entries about personal struggles while making these works in 2010-2011.

März 1, 2017

The Amsterdam-based American artist Jonathan Bragdon was an associate of the Arts Laboratory, Drury Lane, London, from October 1967 to May 1969. Among his activities was the “Info Lab”, a bi-weekly series of one-hour events. For each event, one person was invited to explain his or her work, and the story of how they had come to be doing it. Persons were included from diverse pursuits, such as computer science, film, poetry, politics, and “revolutionary” activism. The audience was instructed to interrupt with skeptical questions and brief comments at any time, creating a situation in which a person was putting themselves together, while they were being taken apart. His later “Single Art Work” project, from 1987 to 2006, was similar, with an artist being invited to bring one of his or her works to an evening with 10 people. In these SAW events, though, conversation was to serve as a shared antenna to the artwork, not an analytical machine.

However, from 1961 to the present day, drawing has been Bragdon’s single fanatical pursuit, in an attempt to save his soul. In 2016, a retrospective of his work was held at the Kunstmuseum, Appenzell, and accompanying it, the book “DASEIN/BEING HERE” was published by Gerhard Steidl, Göttingen.

On March 1, 7 pm, Jonathan Bragdon will revisit his own past in conversation with Max Dax at Santa Lucia Galerie der Gespräche in Berlin. In addition, they will talk about two of Jonathan Bragdon’s current drawings and his exhibition “The Path” at Galerie Aurel Scheibler (January 1 – March 18, 2017), Schöneberger Ufer 71, 10785 Berlin.

September 29, 2016

Max Dax: The label “raster-noton. archiv für ton und nichtton” has existed for exactly 20 years now. When you started in 1996, why did you emphasize the term “archive”?

Carsten Nicolai: First of all, it was a high-brow statement not to call a newly founded label a “label”, but an “archive” instead. We expected raster-noton to be around for a while, so eventually there would also be an archive.

Olaf Bender: It was a positive statement of intent.

Carsten Nicolai: And at the same time, it was about “ton”, meaning “sound”. So in the broadest sense, it was about sounds; it wasn’t just about music. We wanted to generate an open field. And if you look at the label’s catalog numbers today, you’ll find many entries that aren’t music at all, but posters, books, objects, t-shirts or photo documents.

Max Dax: That’s reminiscent of Factory Records in Manchester, where everything received its own catalog number – even the label’s office cat.

Carsten Nicolai: I didn’t know about the cat.

Max Dax: The cat was given the catalog number #191.

Carsten Nicolai: Factory, of course, was a point of reference. And once raster-noton had already been around for some years, we watched the film “24 Hour Party People” together. There’s this famous scene where Peter Saville finally shows up with the finished tickets the morning before the big opening of the Haçienda – and everybody is looking at him, and someone says, “Well, we’ve actually been selling these tickets for two months already”. When Olaf and I saw that scene, we had to grin.

Olaf Bender: And what I also liked, of course, was the story of the first big New Order hit, “Blue Monday”. The cover was so expensive that it ate up all the label’s profits. That was exactly our “business concept” – between the intention and the calculation.

Carsten Nicolai: Because that has constantly been our experience.

Olaf Bender: There are indeed some amazing similarities. Not forgetting Peter Saville himself: the design for Factory was simply and consistently good. It was simultaneously classic and modern in equal measure.

Carsten Nicolai: Peter Saville had the same references as we had, people like Jan Tschichold or the Russian constructivists. And you also mustn’t forget the extent to which we, coming from the East, were frozen in time. In the daily life of the GDR, Tschichold was something like the last true update of typographic aesthetics. David Carson didn’t interest us. Our environment and our Eastern makeshift packaging were much more fascinating. We grew up with that stuff. Many things at raster-noton refer typographically to the aesthetics of the GDR. You only needed to dig out one of our old school exercise books – and we had a perfect cover. Unlike us, Peter Saville had the choice between Tschichold, Malewitsch and all the others. Our everyday existence was the Bauhaus. There was a Wagenfeld teapot in every household. We didn’t even recognize it as special design; for us it was simply everyday life in East Germany. We sampled all that for a long time without even being aware of it; it was more like in our DNA. Obviously, we connect a part of our identity with that design. The three of us, Frank, Olaf and I, once had a band called Signal. For the titles of our tracks, we only chose old brand names from the East: Ermafa, Naplafa, Datasette, Malimo – Robotron was the most best known among them. What all those names had in common was that they felt anonymous and sterile; they were like artificial words. Yet by looking at those names, people could draw conclusions about our origins.

Interview excerpt taken from “raster-noton Sourcebook”, due to be released in Spring 2017 on raster-noton.